I get a lot of reviews that say my work is not novel and I bet I'm not alone. It's always frustrating because I see novelty where the reviewer doesn't. Rather than rebut every critique, I've written a blog post to help reviewers think about novelty.
Michael Black
3,673 posts
Michael Black
@Michael_J_Black
VP Digital Human Research, Epic Games. Emeritus Director, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (@MPI_IS). Opinions are my own.
- PhD students, don't worry. Technologies, trends, and even whole fields come and go. A PhD makes you an expert in a field but, more importantly, teaches you how to become an expert. Once you know that you can learn anything, you can adapt to major disruptions in your field.
- I asked #Galactica about some things I know about and I'm troubled. In all cases, it was wrong or biased but sounded right and authoritative. I think it's dangerous. Here are a few of my experiments and my analysis of my concerns. (1/9)
- In the LLM-science discussion, I see a common misconception that science is a thing you do and that writing about it is separate and can be automated. I’ve written over 300 scientific papers and can assure you that science writing can’t be separated from science doing. Why? 1/18
- The Max Planck Society has pledged to support Ukrainian scientists who have to flee and need a place to work. If you are a computer vision scientist leaving #Ukraine, reach out to me.
- Young scientists regularly ask me for career advice. Academia or industry? Big company or startup? US or Europe? Good scientists in AI disciplines are fortunate to have many choices. But choosing can be stressful. I always give the same advice. 1/10
- arXiv can result in a time travel situation where you find out your daughter is also your mother. We put a paper on arXiv. Someone else built on it, cited us, and published before us. Fine. Now reviewers want us to explain our novelty beyond the published paper. Now what?
- Build what you need and use what you build. This is a core philosophy of my research. It shifts the focus away from publishing “papers” to what really matters — impact. This thread unpacks why I think this is a successful approach to science. 1/10 Or see:
- Google is has started using LLMs for Google Translate and is now making things up. It translated "MPI-IS Tübingen" into "Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-IS) Tübingen". MPI-IS is the MPI for Intelligent Systems. The MPI for Informatics (MPI-I) is located in
- If you're an international PhD student at Harvard studying computer vision and your visa is cancelled, reach out to me or others in Europe. Don't despair. I'm sure we can find you a great place to carry on your research.
- Failure is the dance partner of success. It can feel insurmountable at times. Here is my story of academic failures -- my anti-CV if you will. I hope people find it useful.
- The 5 stages of rebuttal grief. (1) Denial The reviewers totally misunderstood my paper. The review process is broken. R1 was clearly a student who has never reviewed before. R2 doesn’t know what they are talking about. R3 hates me.
- WHAM defines the new state of the art in 3D human pose estimation from video. By a large margin. It’s fast, accurate, and it computes human pose in world coordinates. It’s also the first video-based method to be more accurate than single-image methods. 1/8
00:00 - I think the rule that you do not need to cite arXiv papers in CVPR/ICCV/ECCV submissions confuses people. If you build on prior work, then you must cite it. If that work appeared in arXiv or was painted on the sidewalk, it doesn't matter.
